Why will we love (and hate) the sound of sure phrases?

During the pandemic, many people have felt our stress ranges rise each time we hear the phrase “virus”. However few individuals realise that simply the sound of the phrase virus alone is prone to elevate the blood strain – and would have carried out so even earlier than Covid-19 figured giant within the headlines.

We’ve all skilled how sure sounds can grate on our nerves, such because the noise made by dragging your fingernails throughout a blackboard or the cry of a child, however it seems that the sounds of some phrases (like “virus”) can even have an effect on how we really feel and even give us a clue to what they imply (one thing to keep away from). This phenomenon, the place the sound of a phrase triggers an emotion or a which means, is known as “sound symbolism”. But the concept there could be a hyperlink between phrases’ sounds and their which means flies towards accepted linguistic pondering going again greater than a century.

In our e-book, The Language Sport: How Improvisations Created Language and Modified the World, we define a radically new perspective on how we, as people, received language within the first place, how youngsters can study and use it so effortlessly, and the way sound symbolism figures into this.

The relation between sound and which means

The language sciences have for a very long time assumed that the sound of a phrase ought to inform us nothing about what it means. That is meant to elucidate why totally different languages usually use very totally different sound patterns to precise the identical which means. For instance, the perennial woody plant that we discuss with in English as “tree” is “Baum” in German, “arbre” in French, and “shù” (樹) in Mandarin Chinese language. In fact, languages comprise onomatopoeia equivalent to beep, bang and buzz – however many students, like Steven Pinker, have argued that such sound-meaning relations are mere exceptions that show the rule.

Nonetheless, as language scientists have seemed extra carefully on the world’s greater than 7,000 languages, they’ve found that sound symbolism isn’t any uncommon exception however arises in lots of shapes and varieties. Our evaluation involving practically two-thirds of the world’s languages revealed that there are dependable interrelations between the actual sounds utilized in phrases and what the phrases imply.

For instance, should you choose a language at random that has the idea of “purple”, the corresponding phrase is extra possible than to not have an “r” sound in it — equivalent to “rød” in Danish, “rouge” in French, and “krasnyy” (красный) in Russian. However this doesn’t imply that an “r” sound all the time means “purple”, solely that phrases for purple usually have “r” sounds in them the world over. And these relationships usually are not as a result of the audio system of those languages all stay in the identical place or as a result of they communicate languages that each one derived from a typical ancestor way back.

Made-up phrases might be sound symbolic too. In a basic research from 1929, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler noticed that when Spanish audio system have been proven a rounded form and a spiky one and requested which one they thought have been known as “baluba” and which “takete”, most related baluba with roundedness and takete with spikiness. Subsequent research (changing baluba with bouba and takete with kiki) have discovered comparable patterns amongst American undergraduates and Tamil audio system in India. Even infants as younger as 4 months have comparable preferences.

In a 2021 research, we confirmed that this bouba-kiki impact could be rooted in emotional arousal (calming versus stimulating). Individuals in our experiments felt that the spiky shapes induced a level of edginess, whereas the rounded figures have been perceived as softer and extra calming. Equally, kiki was rated as having tense, laborious sound properties, whereas bouba was extra soothing.

In a last experiment, individuals matched a totally new set of rounded and spiky shapes to a totally new set of bouba/kiki-like nonsense phrases. The outcomes confirmed that spiky shapes have been chosen for high-arousal phrases and rounded shapes for low-arousal phrases. This implies that at the very least a few of the connections between sound and which means in our vocabulary are pushed by our emotional responses to what we see and listen to.

Why we additionally want arbitrariness

Sound symbolic connections between sound and which means are helpful: they’ll make the duty of studying a language simpler as a result of the sound of a phrase can constrain what it would imply. However there are limitations to this.

Pc modelling of how youngsters study language has revealed that, as a toddler’s vocabulary grows, it turns into more durable and more durable to have distinctive sounds to sign totally different facets of which means (equivalent to that each one phrases referring to water ought to begin with a “w”). Certainly, in a research of English sound-meaning mappings, we discovered that phrases that are usually acquired earlier in improvement have been extra sound symbolic than phrases which can be acquired later.

There’s, certainly, a robust drive driving sounds and meanings aside. Suppose that each one breeds of canine have been labelled with extremely comparable phrases: for instance, beagle, bagel and bugle, then the slightest mishearing will imply we recall to mind the mistaken breed. However beagles, bugles, and bagels are very various things. So listening to an individual say they’ve purchased a brand new lead for his or her beagle isn’t prone to trigger a lot confusion (shopping for a lead for a bugle or a bagel is senseless). Disconnecting sound and which means makes communication extra sturdy – and languages will over time are likely to loosen the hyperlink between sound and which means.

But many deep historic hyperlinks between sound and which means are nonetheless detectable and might be surprisingly highly effective. To calm the tensions from listening to a couple of virus, the exact same acoustic analyses suggests an answer: give attention to the soothing, calming sounds of solar, moon and mother, as an alternative.

Morten H Christiansen is the William R Kenan, Jr, professor of psychology, at Cornell College. Nick Chater is a professor of behavioural science at Warwick Enterprise Faculty, College of Warwick. This text first appeared on The Dialog.